Last week was not one of my most productive. I hope I can turn that around this week. We got thumper working on Friday, though as of this writing I've just been informed that it'll have to be shut down again temporarily sometime in the next day or so to put it in the server closet. They tried to do it today but I guess I'll find out in about 30 minutes why it couldn't be done yet. But while thumper's up and running, I can go ahead with more SETHI datacube-making. I also have to catch up to Matt again on making beamfiles for the new HI spectra added to the database. He's ahead by about 150,000 spectra right now.

For the GALFA project, there've been two problems. One was that the code was reversing the velocity axis so that HI emission that was supposed to be seen at, say, +100 km/s was actually seen at -100 km/s. I'm glad I caught this early on, since between myself and a colleague down the hill we have about a terabyte of datacubes to create. The other problem is that ewen has been self-rebooting from time to time, which is greatly impeding my progress on making these datacubes. Eric has been trying to figure out why this is happening, which might require a filesystem check, which means stopping all jobs for a while (hopefully just overnight). On the bright side, we just made a whole bunch of dust maps with the same tiling scheme as our HI cubes, so we can get going on doing some dust-to-gas comparison studies for these data. It also seems that the GALFA processing is going slower now that SETHI is up and running too, but I probably can't do much about that.

Apart from that, things are going fine. My poster for Bioastronomy 2007 is coming along. I'm not going to the conference but I'll give Eric my poster so he can stand by it while he's having fun in Puerto Rico. I'm pretty happy with how the 3rd round of the NHL playoffs are going so far. It would be great to have another Canadian team in the final, and even better if Ottawa could win the Cup. Right now I'm in the "anyone but Detroit again" camp, actually.

I'm pretty happy with how the 3rd round of the NHL playoffs are going so far. It would be great to have another Canadian team in the final, and even better if Ottawa could win the Cup. Right now I'm in the "anyone but Detroit again" camp, actually.

Looks like Anaheim is putting up a good fight; with any luck the winner of that series will be facing Ottawa in the final with less than a full head of steam.

I'm pretty happy with how the 3rd round of the NHL playoffs are going so far. It would be great to have another Canadian team in the final, and even better if Ottawa could win the Cup. Right now I'm in the "anyone but Detroit again" camp, actually.

Looks like Anaheim is putting up a good fight; with any luck the winner of that series will be facing Ottawa in the final with less than a full head of steam.

Indeed, all is going well this round. Anaheim-Detroit will go at least 6 games and Ottawa is poised to get into the final with some rest. Anyone know if the backup goalies for Detroit, Buffalo or Ottawa have even played at all in the playoffs? You gotta wonder how they keep going.

I guess we're slowly coming out of our backlog with thumper going down. My work was only moderately affected by it, in that my SETHI jobs need to read files on thumper's disks to get beam information about individual spectra. But since Monday or so I've had 12 of those jobs crunching away. Some of those are more than halfway done, so early next week I should have some more SETHI cubes to analyze. Right now I'm using thumper to make some GALFA datacubes too, since ewen is acting flaky again, rebooting itself for no good reason.

Some of you will have already heard about ptolemy, another new machine we recently acquired. Well, I hope I'm the first to tell you all about vader, yet another powerhouse machine that's come into our possession. I don't know its specs but it's got 16 GB of RAM, and in the neighbourhood of 3.8GHz processor speed (I forget how many cores). As you might guess from its name, it's more powerful than sidious and might be intended as a backup for it, or something like that. For now I'm using it for more GALFA processing, but it must not be on our gigabit switch since it takes a long time to write outputs to ewen. Eric only got it up yesterday so I'm sure it will soon enough find its place in our ever louder server closet.